UK Dow Jones Summer High School Journalism Workshop 2009

Fourteen high school students from Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia spent 10 days on the University of Kentucky campus during June 2009 to develop The Progress Post. The students learned journalism fundamentals and then were thrown into researching, reporting, writing and editing stories on a variety of topics organized around the idea of what sports can teach us about other cultures. (See below for an essay by workshop student Ashley Scoby of Glasgow, Ky. on sports and culture.)

Links to the workshop newspaper pages appear below in pdf form. The newspaper was generously printed by The Winchester Sun in Winchester, Ky.

All students participated in a discussion session on the First Amendment and then wrote an opinion piece on a First Amendment topic. A panel of judges did blind judging and ranked the essays. First place: Ashley Scoby, Glasgow, Ky. Second place: Parys Grigsby, College Park, Ga. Third place: Larkin Walker, Lexington, Ky. Honorable mention: Drucilla Thompson, Memphis, Tenn. and Rachel Cunningham, Maysville, Ky.

The reporting staff of The Progress Post; click on the student’s name for a profile (written by a fellow workshop student) and the student’s First Amendment essay.

Sports and Culture By: Ashley Scoby “It’s just a game.” This statement will never be true. No matter the sport, it is never just a game. Sports teach us values such as determination, respect, teamwork and overcoming adversity. Sports help take our minds off our daily lives and focus on something bigger than any individual. They provide us with role models to shape our lives after. They provide athletes with platforms from which they can start changing the world. But perhaps most importantly of all, sports give us a way to understand different cultures and the diversities that make us who we are.

Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association, for example, bring in players from all over the world to play in the United States. Countries such as China, the Dominican Republic and Spain are all represented in America by some of today’s superstars – Yao Ming (NBA), Alex Rodriguez (MLB) and Pau Gasol (NBA), respectively. We’ve learned about how kids start out playing baseball in the streets of the Dominican Republic, through the story of Alex Rodriguez. That story helps us to understand what life is like in a place that is not America. Because of Yao Ming, we’ve learned more about the Chinese culture, and we have come to respect the fact that Yao wants to play for his native country in the Olympics, instead of the United States. He has pride for his birthplace, and eventually, that pride inspires others to not only respect his culture, but to be proud of their own.

Fans are not the only ones positively affected by the diversity within sports – players are also. No matter what sport somebody plays, whether it is basketball, baseball, soccer, or hockey, players will always have to communicate and form relationships with the other members of their team. Those teammates don’t always speak the same language or practice the same traditions as each other. But through exposure to each other, teammates (both American and international) learn about the cultures that are not their own. They’re exposed to new ideas, new values, and new language, but out of this diversity emerges a new respect for the world that we live in as a whole.

Our world today is sometimes considered the sum of the parts, instead of the greater whole that it truly is. Sports help to blur the lines between cultures, and they help us to understand why color or language barriers shouldn’t be important in the long run. Sports are never just games; rather, they are the open doors to living in a world in which cultures are better understood and racial barriers no longer exist.

Written on Monday, 16 August 2010 17:37
and last modified on Thursday, 02 September 2010 17:18